‘Red Army 2.0’: human-flesh search engines in China

Western understanding of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ leaves a lot to be desired. The phenomenon of renrou sousuo yinqing, human-flesh search engines, sheds some light on the predominant values in contemporary Chinese society:

‘…they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results….’